Difficulties With Awesome Endings for Video Games: Why So Many Game Endings Suck
Posted by Shawn on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 2:51 pm under Gamer Life, Games Industry
Tagged: Destructoid, endings and video games
Destructoid has a feature by ReverendAnthony on the difficult task of writing a truly awesome ending for a video game. You can have involving characters and a great plot but if the ending falls flat, it can ruin your video game experience. For instance the first Ultima Underground. You get to the end, seal the gate and then… all you can do is run like Hell until your character gets killed off.
A good ending should be “narratively satisfying” and should evolve from the actions of the player. In other words there should be some kind of conclusion to the story and the player should feel like their character actually had something to do with reaching that conclusion. However the storyteller has to be careful how he presents the ending of the game.
Why do so many video game endings suck? Gamers want big spectacular games that are fun to play. Video games usually end with some kind of dramatic shoot out, spectacular escape, or the ultimate boss battle followed by a quick bit of story and some dialog to wrap up. Although the boss battle/epilogue ending gets boring fast the alternative isn’t a winning move either. Unhappy endings are rarely appreciated. Adding drama to the climax by, say… killing the character off or punishing him in some way is sure to piss the player off. It also takes the character out of the player’s control which has a similar effect. Also when a player is confronted with an unhappy ending they tend to dismiss it as being unreal. They’ll wonder what they could have done differently and often try to go back to fix their screwups.
Finally most games today are written so the ending is, well open ended so the story has somewhere to go for a sequel.
“I wouldn’t dare suggest that a game with an open ending is automatically unsatisfying, but this pragmatic necessity of creating endings with the possibility for a sequel really makes it hard to tell a taut, effective story.“
As a writer I do realize how hard it was to write a compelling end to a video game. However, I reserve the right to complain about endings that suck.
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June 13th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Now that you mention it, I can't really think of a recent game that had a satisfying ending and that WASN'T a cliff-hanger. I think it's to do with the new age of being able to game on-line with other people and the focus of attention away from any sort of single player towards online play and yeah, playing Halo, UT04 or BF2142 online is killer-fun, it's not quite matching the off-line modes of other games (gah, include Halo too) which the consoles tend to have a little better. When games HAD to have good single player, they were great. Now…well…it's kinda meh.
June 14th, 2007 at 12:29 am
I can think of several last-generation games with a satisfying (to me, anyway) ending–Primal, The Mark of Kri, Beyond Good and Evil, God of War, Jak III, Gun, Okami, ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, etc. Note, however, that none of these games are first-person shooters, and most of them weren't followed up with a sequel. I think those are the main reasons so many games have endings that suck. The developers want to leave open the possibility of a sequel, or else the game is in a genre where story isn't considered important. I note that I rarely see an RPG on a list of games with endings that suck, for instance.